Optical switching offers many significant advantages over known electronic switching techniques. Among these advantages are the greatly increased bandwidth and rapid switch reconfiguration rates. Also, with the increased use of photonics as a transmission method, the elimination of optical/electronic conversion when a switch is encountered, is a desirable result. One known optical switch architecture is constructed of a plurality of 1 to N active signal splitters interconnected with a plurality of N to 1 active signal combiners. Electrical signals are used to control to which output of a signal splitter an optical input signal is sent, and, similarly, electrical signals control which optical input of a signal combiner is connected to the one output. With this known architecture, an N-by-N switch array comprises N signal splitters (one for each input) and N signal combiners (one for each output). The splitters and combiners are then interconnected so that each output of each splitter is connected as an input to each of the combiners. This switch architecture exhibits acceptable signal to noise and attenuation characteristics. However, N.times.N connections must be made between the splitters and combiners. When the switch has a large number of inputs and outputs, the number of connections may become unwieldy. For example, to construct a 32-by-32 network, 1,034 splitter/combiner connections must be made. If optical fibers are used as the interconnection media, the physical size of the number interconnection paths reduces the desirability of the arrangement. Additionally, the connection of optical fibers to the splitters and combiners adds signal attenuation. The physical size of the interconnection may be reduced by placing all splitters and combiners on a single substrate and by fabricating crossing light guides between the splitters and combiners in the substrate. This would require 246,016 crossovers (crossthroughs) of light guides for a 32-by-32 switch. Since each crossover decreases the signal to noise ratio and increases the attenuation, such crossovers would severely limit the device's usefulness. Thus, problems exist in fabricating networks of optical switch elements such that the resulting network has good signal transmission characteristics.